Dagwood’s America
Columbia Magazine, pp 3 and 22
January 1944
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From deep within the heart of Dagwood Bumstead there arises an anguished cry, a loud lament of unfeigned desolation which constantly reminds his friends that, finally, there is nothing laughable about his confused and timidly suburban soul. The humble pathos with which he endures an incessant barrage of humiliations, a series of exuberant insults which daily pulverize his vestigial masculine ego, this constitutes the basic fascination of millions of readers. How long will be he able to bear up against the contemptuous condescensions of Blondie and of his children? How long can he endure the massed assaults on his privacy and dignity from tramps, salesmen and children? How long will his rugged individualism be able to satisfy itself by nocturnal raids on the ice-box? How long can barbarically contrived sandwiches fulfill that craving for loot and adventure which mock him from the depths of his frustrated being?
The uninterrupted popularity of Dagwood’s miseries since 1930 entitles him to be considered as a nationally appointed symbol of something in our lives. Somehow the patterns of behavior in Dagwood’s home reflect the interests and experiences of millions of readers. This reflection may or may not be direct. At least it will be interesting to ask a few questions and to offer some answers to those questions which will illuminate our daily lives.
Why Is Dagwood the Way He Is?
Why is Dagwood so seedy and saggy in appearance? Why is he so tired, so sleepy, so hungry? Why is he so confused, so inadequate when trying to do the simplest task? Why does he spend so much time curled up on the sofa or in the bathtub? Why must he always rush off to catch the bus?
These recurring situations must be viewed in relation to Blondie. Why is she so neat and primly efficient? Why is she so sure of herself? Why does she feel so much at home in a world which is an endless and unremitting ignominy to Dagwood?
Both these situations must be seen in connection with Alexander, Cookie, and, of course, Daisy and her pups. Why is Alexander so cocksure of himself and so patronizing to Dagwood? Why is he forever preparing booby-traps for Dagwood, or asking him questions which make Dagwood seem less mature than himself? Why is Cookie a perpetual source of astonishment and wonder to Dagwood? Why is Dagwood so much intimidated by his children, and so helpless in holding his own against the chaos created by Daisy and her pups?
The best way to answer these questions is to consider Dagwood’s family tree. Jiggs begat Dagwood. What Jlggs was to America thirty years ago, Dagwood is to America today. If one asks who beget Jiggs, the answer is not so obvious. One might say, however, that the man portrayed by Clarence Day in “Life with Father” was the predecessor of “Bringing up Father”. Since “Life with Father” is a currently popular stage play, many have been able to see that in the 1880’s and 1890’s “Father” was on the verge of becoming ludicrous.
Clarence Day’s father is represented as a virile man, conscious of masculine interests and masculine authority. He has no doubts of his right to impose these on the pattern of his home. He demands privacy, quiet, good food, and order and punctuality. His children obey him without hesitation. However, his regime is tottering for often he has to raise his voice or lose his temper in order to impress his will on his wife. Mrs Day is as completely the opposite of Blondie as Mr Day was of Dagwood. Beside Mrs Day, Blondie is egotistical and masculine. Beside Mr Day, Dagwood is altruistic and feminine. Mrs. Day was fluttery and ineffectual, using irresponsibility and tears of dismayed helplessness as deadly weapons of rebellion against the horrid masculine world in which she lived. Of course, nobody ever rebels against a regime that is not lacking in inner conviction.
If we move on twenty or thirty years to the America of “Bringing up Father”, we meet a family which is poised between two worlds — between a masculine and a feminine world, Of course, the world of Jiggs is already washed up. The symbol of its defeat is the fact that it has been banished to furtive banquetings and roisterings with the gashouse boys. The “serious” concerns of life and left to Maggie and Daughter, who cultivate “the higher things”. But Jiggs is unrepentantly rebellious. He never gives in although he endures many humiliations. He remains absolutely convinced of the value of his own standards of life, and completely contemptuous of what Maggie considers to be culture. George McManus was just as pro-Jiggs as Chic Young is pro-Blondie. This is another way of saying that America has swung very far toward the feminine pole of the axis in recent years.
lf Mr. Day was noisily assertive and Jiggs stubbornly rebellious, what of Dagwood? In Dagwood we see not only defeat but docility and oblivion, He seems not to have any recollection of what constitutes a man’s’ world or masculine interests. He lives in a vacuum, isolated from all contact with men, save men of his own kind. In his world Blondie and her children are supreme. Nothing else exists. Totally deprived of the prerogatives of a father, not aware of the need or even the possibility of impersonal masculine authority in the home, he has become hungry for affection and understanding; and in order to obtain these there is no pose of childish irresponsibility and petulance which he fails to assume.
His craving for maternal affection is doomed, however. Blondie is efficiently masculine, purposive, egotistical and hard, just as Dagwood is ineffectually feminine, altruistic and sensitive. She has assumed, superficially, the masculine role just in proportion as he has lost it. Now nobody would read Chic Young’s comic strip, nobody would get the point unless he constantly assumed that the relations of Dagwood and Blondie are topsy-turvy. Again nobody would read Chic Young unless his comic strip portrayed some basic pattern or conflict of American life. Chic Young is almost the only popular social satirist, we have. Nearly all the other “comic” strips provide escapist stuff.
In ordinary society it is man who imposes his demands and standards on the conduct of the household. In traditional human relationships man imposes rational authority and order and purpose, receiving in return emotional support and security from his wile. The purpose, the rational order of his life in the outside world is sustained and renewed by the affection of’ his home. Dagwood, however, has no rational purpose in life; he gives nothing to, and gets nothing from, his work. He has no directing principle of order and creative activity in him. Instead of receiving affection, he tries to give affection. His world is his home. He pours himself, such as he is, into his home. Blondie alone has purpose, not the purpose to assist her husband’s unimagined career, but the obvious one of keeping her children healthy and out of mischief. Basically, she cannot help despising Dagwood for the easy ascendancy she has over him. The attitude of pitying affection she has towards him she imparts to her children as well.
America Belongs to Blondie
If, however, any “blame” is owing for this grotesque family pattern, it is Dagwood’s. It is he who has collapsed, not Blondie. She retains her feminine capacities for sacrifice and devotion, just as surely as Dagwood has lost all masculine capacity for evoking her best feminine qualities . Every phase of Dagwood is comic only because the readers of Dagwood still recognize that he is supposed to be a masculine being with the habits of a man. His departure from the social ideal and his resemblance to the existing pattern of American family life are the source of the amusement.
Dagwood is absurd and pathetic, not in himself but because he reflects a widespread state of affairs in America today. Blondie and her children own America, control American business and entertainment, run hog-wild in spreading maternalism into education and politics, but they did not make America. Dagwood made It, and Dagwood alone can restore balance to a completely, lop-sided social life, because Dagwood is Mr Everyman in America today.
He is a man without convictions or self-respect because his work offers him neither prestige nor fulfilment. He is a wage-serf dispossessed and alienated from the entire framework of economic and social life. His wife “doesn’t understand him” simply because he doesn’t understand himself. Having never entered into his principal masculine heritage, the detached use of autonomous reason for the critical appraisal of life, he is totally without the means of locating the cause or cure of his disturbances and frustrations.
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If Dagwood should ever once use his reason to reflect on the causes of his plight he would cease to behave in his stymied fashion. He would regain some poise and control, and, with these, detachment and authority. He would become the autonomous and rational male. He would cease to be the comic, “little man”.
How did this come about? How did Dagwood forfeit his masculine ego and thereby force Blondie to take up the social slack by herself becoming masculine? For justice forces us to recognize that American women are not to blame for the collapse of the masculine role in society. They are eager to resume the feminine role of altruistic sacrifice and self-effacement, as the war has proved. As soon as men regained one recognizably masculine role by donning uniforms, their women changed from the predatory and. purposive beings they had been. Women are indifferent to security and comfort when their men are taking risks. On the other hand, when men enjoy self-respect and honest prestige, they don’t have to suffocate their wives and children with affection and luxuries in order to disguise their own futility.
How did Mr Everyman get into his present predicament of masculine frustration? It began over a hundred years ago when men themselves kicked-out props from under their own masculine egos. These props have always been, and always will be, spiritual and intellectual. When men drifted away from religion and put utility and profit in place of the authority of autonomous reason, they sold themselves. With the proceeds they built Main Street, and paid educators to pump pragmatism into the main currents of American thought. Today the official American philosophy uttered by John Dewey denies reason itself. Mr Dewey, as the product of a profit~getting society teaches that reason is only an instrument of utility, a subtle and superior muscle for managing our environment. Of course this doctrine destroys not only the proposition.that men are created free and equal by virtue of their God-given rational souls, but it destroys any objective ethics. It automatically deprives Mr Dewey of the right to criticize Hitler. For unless impersonal and unchanging reason itself condemns Hitler then nobody can offer a valid reason to restrain him.
American philosophy and education have undermined the masculine ego because they reflect the life of the frontier. The frontier developed the virtue of self-reliance but it also fostered the spirit of incessant activity. As excessive activity starved the other needs of man and sharpened the spirit of gain and commercialism, an unofficial blackout was ordained over the spiritual and intellectual areas of man’s nature. This Jefferson foresaw and dreaded. Against this possibility the whole force, of his resourceful masculine spirit was bent. But Hamilton’s cynical creed won out, at least for the time.
Inevitably. the frontier held up an adolescent athleticism as the standard of masculinity, while the little red schoolhouse handed over the symbols and functions of intellectual life and authority to women. Of course the little red schoolhouse brought co-education as well because it saved money. However, since girls are more docile and industrious than boys, they easily outdo them in the classroom. This naturally encourages boys to abandon studies as effeminate.
Thus, while the frontier had its urgencies, it also had its specious evasions. it was as much an escape as challenge for our ancestors. American men seem to have been only too eager to throw in the sponge of intellectual discipline to Mrs Everyman. In so doing, they created a brand new human absurdity which exists today in a form so huge that it can no longer be taken in at a glance — the absurdity of boys being educated by women and in the same classroom with girls!
Women were forced into American education by default, They took up what men had abandoned and they did the best they could. Naturally, children are objects of solicitude and maternal sympathy. They have thus transformed our schools, in theory and practice into gigantic nurseries where Johnny and Mary are taught how to get along together. Being intellectually unenterprising, much given to formula and routine, having no concept of impersonal authority, women school teachers can never impart to anybody intellectual energy and ambition. They are more interested in pupil than subject, so that American boys never form any notion of what constitutes specifically masculine attitudes and approaches to knowledge. This notion comes, but it comes too late, at university.
Thus Dagwood, our Mr Everyman, is the residual legatee of a century during which the masculine ideal of noble being has been systematically destroyed by the base ideal of endless doing. Men are now increasingly aware of their plight because endless doing has involved them in unsolvable frustrations. For the accumulated heritage of unrestrained tycoons and predatory power-gluttons has led us into a vast suburban swamp from which few can ever emerge sane and whole.
The map which can alone lead Dagwood out of this swamp is the image of his lost masculine ego. That image he can now recover only by taking thought. He could, of course, find It quickest of all in healthy and fructifying work, but unfortunately he must wait to invent this work until after he has rediscovered the ineradicable roots of his own being. But he can never discover nourishment for these roots in popular art and literature, for these things have for a long time, and through his own fault, been entirely a woman’s domain. As one ad for a national magazine with eight million readers says:
From cover to cover there isn’t a wasted word or an idle page. Glamour and fun, mystery and heart-beat — the whole range of women’s interests handled by brilliant story-teIlers and understanding thinkers.
The press, the pulps, the slicks, and Hollywood — it is a great nursery world of sensations, thrills, and wide-eyed child-like myopia.
Nevertheless, a Dagwood here and there is beginning to discover ideas and is beginning to discuss them with neighbor Woodley. This means that the naughty-little-boy pose will be forgotten as the need for mothering-wedlock ceases, and Dagwood will lose himself and his frustrations in the rediscovery of thoughts and ideals of high and unrewarded endeavor.
